David Waldman (Kagro X), talking about the Blue Dog Democrats who are trying to water down the mortgage assistance plan to please Republicans:

Yes, trying to help the nearly 2.5 million homeowners projected to go into foreclosure in 2009 "makes them look too liberal," and the only way to make this bill "moderate" enough is to side with the banks, who had the gift of the Republican bankruptcy bill handed to them in 2005, but still couldn't manage to survive as a viable industry without at $700 billion bailout (with more to come).

Josh Marshall:

Atrios pointed me to Joe Nocera's piece in the Times on AIG and just what it was they were doing and why we're now having to spend perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars to clean up the mess.

I strongly recommend reading it.

TPM even has a picture of Nocera up next to the recommendation.

I don't know much of anything about AIG, but I know that when Joe Nocera starts being a public financial scold, there's a decent chance that the truth is in the opposite direction.

Nocera loves writing this stuff because, as seen above, he can recycle it for years and years and years, never worrying about whether it was accurate. I know everyone wants to figure out exactly what the hell was going on at AIG, but Nocera's track record doesn't qualify him to point the fingers at people being "greedy."